Feminism

The emergence of the women's liberation movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s had a profound impact on scholarship as well as on society. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) set the stage for liberation movements by detailing middle-class women's isolation, even oppression, within the suburban household. Women's roles in the antinuclear movements, such as the Aldermaston marches in the United Kingdom or SANE (Students Against Nuclear Energy) in the United States, further served as catalysts in the mid-1960s within diverse social sectors. For example, women within the male-dominated Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began to resist their relegation to food preparation and child care, and to argue for women's rights to be included in the SDS agenda. In NUC (the New University Community), a faculty wing of SDS, pressure increased in regard to addressing women's issues, such as discriminatory employment practices, unfair divorce laws, and attention to medical and biological issues specific to women. Independent Marxist-feminist groups emerged along with so-called radical feminists, often linked to lesbian-centered groups. Protests and demonstrations on behalf of women's rights regarding sexual choice, day care, and equality in the workplace pushed women's liberation into the public spotlight. Gradually public awareness and involvement in debates about feminist issues increased. Meanwhile, female perspectives, long neglected in mainstream academic research, began to gain the attention of historians and literary and film scholars. Indeed, these two faces of feminism can hardly be separated: Academic women were often actively involved in working for social change on a range of women's issues, while activist women often enjoyed the support of universities in furthering their ends.

Women film scholars were among the first to reject the traditional male-centered perspectives in academia and, with Copernican force, to reverse the position from which texts were approached to engage a female-centered one. With Sexual Politics (1970), a forceful critique of misogyny in the male modern novel and of Freud's male-centered psychoanalytic theories, Kate Millett burst on the literary scene and was soon followed by other (less vitriolic) feminist literary critics. Women film scholars, too, eagerly took up the baton. Meanwhile, male film theory (especially in England) introduced structuralist approaches in the wake of research by scholars such as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. In this context, some feminist film theory also turned to neo-Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis in ways not so common at the time in feminist literary analyses. Feminist critics began to look at the ways in which women were represented on film as well as to expose the utter neglect of female directors in male scholarship; in the wake of these initiatives, film scholarship was never again the same. Three main strands (in practice, often mixed) emerged early on in feminist film theory: "archival" and historical approaches, sociological role-focused approaches, and what has been called cine-psychoanalysis. A certain coherence within the limited frame of 1970s and 1980s feminist film research can be demonstrated, built around the concept of the gendered gaze of the camera; but in the 1990s, as a result of changing political, social, and intellectual contexts, including the waning of feminism as a widespread activist movement, several alternate perspectives developed. There was the flood of research by minority and women of the Third World (itself a problematic and much-debated term). Masculine studies, inspired by feminist theory, emerged, as well as queer studies, which severely challenged some of the concepts basic to feminist film theories. Finally, the introduction of new interdisciplinary fields like visual studies and digital media, related to film studies, had the effect of broadening the somewhat narrow gaze-related theories to consider historical, technological, and institutional contexts given short shift in cine-psychoanalysis. Second-wave feminist theorists have further revised gaze theories.

FROM ARCHIVAL RESEARCH TO CINE-PSYCHOANALYSIS

In tandem with ongoing scholarship in history and literature, women film scholars have long endeavored to identify forgotten filmmakers—forgotten because most male film critics and scholars writing before the 1960s were not interested in women directors. Because their films were in distribution, Dorothy Arzner (1897–1979) and Ida Lupino (1914–1995) were the first women directors in the sound era to be studied. Foreign directors, like Mai Zetterling (1925–1994), also gained attention at this time. Later, feminists took a great deal of interest in women directors and producers from the silent era, like Lois Weber (1881–1939) and Mary Pickford (1892–1979). Since the 1990s, the Women Film Pioneers Project has been engaged in intensive international study of early women in cinema in their many roles.

Sociological analysis of women in film soon followed. Three books on women and film emerged at nearly the same time in the early 1970s, mainly using a sociological and role-focused analysis: Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape (1973), Marjorie Rosen's Popcorn Venus (1972), and Joan Mellen's Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (1974). Although perhaps insufficiently appreciated by academic feminists in its historical moment, Haskell's book has had the longest-lasting impact. Feminist film theorists of the time, frustrated by sociological and role analyses, were seeking to move beyond Haskell's approach. Drawing on a vast knowledge of Hollywood as an institution and of movies themselves, Haskell took a penetrating look at the shabby treatment of women on- and offscreen. She had a strong feminist understanding of how threatened American men felt by women, as well as an intense appreciation of actresses and their performances. Haskell points out the irony that both the Production Code and the Depression "brought women out of the bedroom and into the office" (p. 30). She argues that actresses of the 1930s and 1940s (such as Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford) offered images of intelligence, forcefulness, and personal power, far surpassing roles of actresses in later films. Male directors who "integrate women into the flow of life" enjoyed the spunky, smart woman capable of challenging the hero. Haskell defines herself as a film critic first and a feminist second, hoping to address "the wholeness and complexity of film history" (p. 38).

A new generation of women film scholars turned to the melded disciplines of metaphysics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, a shift prompted by what they saw as the limits of studies focusing on individual actresses and women's roles in cinema. To compare images of women in film with women's lived reality seemed simply to critique the current gendered organization of society or to expand it by, for instance, insisting on more male involvement in domestic matters. The new scholars hoped instead to discover the root cause of women's secondary status in Hollywood and society in the first place. Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), partly inspired by reaction to American sociological film analyses, seemed to fulfill the need for a new kind of analysis, and her ideas rapidly took hold. Mulvey's polemical contribution was to isolate three related "looks" in Hollywood cinema, and to argue that these were all male: the look of the camera (mainly operated by men) in the pro-filmic studio site; the look of the spectator, which of necessity followed the camera's masculine gaze; and the dominating look of male characters within the filmic narrative, depriving women of agency and subjectivity. Theorizing the cinematic gaze from a psychoanalytic perspective, Mulvey argued that in film viewing the screen paralleled Jacques Lacan's mirror phase in which the child misrecognized his perfect self. Cinema was set up so that men could identify with the idealized male hero within the symbolic order as presented by the narrative, while women were left to identify with figures relegated to inferior status and silenced. Mulvey was one of the first to appropriate psychoanalysis as a political weapon to demonstrate how the patriarchal unconscious has structured film form. The essay's significance derived in part from her vivid language: "Woman's desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound: she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it." Man, she argued, can live out his fantasies by "imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning" (Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 14).

In the wake of Mulvey's deliberately polemical essays, certain tropes and conventions began to develop in relation to a "male" gaze and the three "looks" that Mulvey outlined. In addition, British and American television studies had an impact on psychoanalytic feminist film theory, for the medium of TV necessitated different theories of the spectator–screen relationship. These theories were seen to have some application to film, expanding the rather restricted notion that there was just one "male" gaze.

Mulvey's essay was often misread as a depressing description of woman's fate rather than as a call to action. Mulvey in fact believed that psychoanalytic theory could advance our understanding of the position of women and thereby enable women to move forward. Her effort to challenge the pleasures of Hollywood cinema arose from Hollywood's reliance on voyeurism—the male gaze at the woman deprived of agency. Her polemical call "to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment" (p. 26) clearly related to her own practice (together with Peter Wollen) as an avant-garde filmmaker.

DOROTHY ARZNER
b. San Francisco, California, 3 January 1897, d. 1 October 1979

Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino were the only female directors in the classical Hollywood era (roughly 1930 to 1960). Both received scant attention until scholars began to study film from a feminist perspective. After serving her apprenticeship in Hollywood, first as typist and then as screenwriter and successful film editor, Arzner directed films for Paramount from 1927 to 1933, when she left to make films independently. She retired from filmmaking in 1943 for reasons that remain unclear but perhaps have to do with her health or the exhaustion of working in a male-dominated establishment. Despite Arzner's short Hollywood career, she made several important films, including Christopher Strong (1933), Craig's Wife (1936), and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), that now belong to a canon of what have been called "resisting" Hollywood melodramas.

Although many of her films appear to conform to Hollywood's patriarchal ideology—something Arzner no doubt was careful to do to keep her job—there is often a critical undertow to her narratives. In Christopher Strong Katharine Hepburn plays an independent, pioneering female pilot, Lady Cynthia Darrington (loosely modeled on Amelia Earhart). In love with a married man by whom she has become pregnant, she apparently commits suicide when attempting to break an aviation record. Arzner clearly intends the viewer to identify with the courageous female aviation pioneer, and to see in her suicide her sense of responsibility both toward Strong's wife and her unborn child. Craig's Wife offers a contrasting type of heroine and demands other kinds of identification from the viewer. Harriet Craig (Rosalind Russell) dominates her daughter, intervenes in her love life, and tries to prevent her from marrying the man she adores. Although it is hard to identify with Harriet, Arzner manages to show how the entire upper-middle-class family system produces women like her.

Dance, Girl, Dance offers an interesting insight into the often degrading lives of female performers. The film's perhaps dated binary opposition between "high" and "low" female performance art—presented as an opposition between a ballerina (Maureen O'Hara) and a sexy dancer (Lucille Ball)—nevertheless allows her to critique the male gaze and to reveal the crudity of male voyeurism. Women, the film suggests, are split apart because of what men want from them. Thus, in her films Arzner is able to render "strange" the patriarchal ideology pervasive in classical Hollywood cinema.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Christopher Strong (1933), Craig's Wife (1936), Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

FURTHER READING

Johnston, Claire, ed. The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Toward a Feminist Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1975.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 2000.

Mayne, Judith. Directed by Dorothy Arzner. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Suter, Jacqueline. "Feminine Discourse in Christopher Strong." Camera Obscura 1, no. 2 (1979): 135–150.

E. Ann Kaplan

Mulvey's article prompted a good deal of research, as well as intelligent critiques of her theories. Early on, E. Ann Kaplan's Women and Film (1983) tried to straddle some of the debates about feminist film theory ongoing in the 1970s. Asking why some women were so strongly drawn to psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, she

argued that pointing to social oppression per se could not account for women's second-class status. Attention to language and the unconscious seemed to offer some hope of understanding what increasingly seemed a mystery that biology—namely, that women gave birth and were needed to care for children and that this very function limited what they could achieve—could not explain. Too many exceptions showed that women could overcome or deal with their biological roles; there had to be something deeper, something much harder to change than social policies or cultural norms.

Like other work in the field at the time, Kaplan's conception of the feminine, given its generally heterosexual and Eurocentric focus and orientation, was apparently a monolithic "woman" who was really a white, Western woman, neglecting the specificity of minority and other marginalized women. A bit later, David Rodowick pointed out that Mulvey did not attend to Freud's complex remarks about the contradictoriness of desire that calls into question strict gender binaries such as male/female and activity/passivity. Mary Ann Doane extended Mulvey's research, pursuing avenues that Mulvey only touched on. For example, Doane introduced the concept of the female body in its relation to the psyche, as against the prior focus on image and psyche. She contrasted representation of the female body in Hollywood and in avant-garde cinema, influencing later research. Doane also contrasted male and female distance from the image, arguing that for the male the distance between film and spectator must be maintained, whereas the female overidentifies with the image, obliterating the space between viewer and screen, thereby producing a degree of narcissism. Turning to Joan Riviere's concept of the female masquerade, Doane explores what it might mean to "masquerade" as a spectator. She concludes that there are three possible positions for the female spectator: the masochism of overidentification with the image, the narcissism involved in becoming one's own object of desire, and the possibility of cross-gender identification, as women choose to identify with the male hero. Doane objects to theories of repression because they lack feminine power, instead taking the position that women need to develop a theory of spectatorship apart from those that male culture has constructed for them.

Gaylyn Studlar has suggested that a focus on pre-Oedipality makes more sense than the conventional attention to Oedipal scenarios for explaining how films construct gendered spectators. Substituting Gilles Deleuze's study of Sacher-Masoch's novels for Mulvey's Freudian/Lacanian framework, she argues that masochism can also ground narrative. Studlar replaces Oedipal sadism with pre-Oedipal pleasure, viewing masochism as a "subversive" desire that affirms the compelling power of the pre-Oedipal mother.

BEYOND CINE-PSYCHOANALYSIS

As these debates show, there was never any uniformity within cine-psychoanalysis about the gaze, or about what kind of psychoanalysis was most appropriate to cinematic modes. But with its binarisms, psychoanalytic film theories fitted the Cold War era in that they looked back to nineteenth-century Europe and reflected a world fixed on a framework in which communism versus capitalism was a subtext. Freud's theories enabled an understanding of the neuroses produced in the nineteenth-century bourgeois family—itself the anchoring institution for the Industrial Revolution. In this light, using psychoanalysis in a critique of capitalist ideology made sense. In the years since 1983, US culture and society have changed dramatically, as have international relations. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union to open space for rethinking imperialism and it took the increased flows of peoples across borders and into the academy to encourage new perspectives, such as postmodernism and its related postcolonialism.

As cine-psychoanalytic theories began to seem rather formulaic—despite the efforts of Doane and other scholars to underscore the complexities and penetrating questions that such theory involved, and despite Mulvey's own continuing "corrections" to her polemical 1975 essay—more resistance to gaze theories arose. In the 1980s B. Ruby Rich, Gayle Arbuthnot, Sue-Ellen Case, and other gay women offered strong critiques emerging from their alternate perspectives (even if these were not so explicitly marked as "lesbian" as in later work). It was primarily the dominance of French structuralism—Lacanian theories, Saussurian semiotics, and Althusserian Marxism—in gaze theories that troubled critics, along with the obvious heterosexual foundation on which the theories were based. It was this foundation that Teresa De Lauretis so profoundly interrogated. Working with Freud's and Luce Irigaray's theories among others, De Lauretis notes the intimate relationship of sexual and social indifference in Western culture for centuries—a link that served to bolster colonial conquest and racist violence—before turning to examine lesbian representation through diverse attempts of lesbian writers and artists to deploy their struggles in ways that engage the body as linked to language and meaning. Meanwhile, the so-called Stella Dallas debate, referring to the 1937 film in which Barbara Stanwyck portrays a woman who gives up her beloved daughter in hopes of giving her a better life among more "respectable" people, dramatized differences emerging in feminist film theory. Kaplan argued that filmic identification with the figure of Stella invited audiences to accept as proper her giving up her daughter and therefore forgoing motherhood through her internalization of patriarchal familial norms. By contrast, Linda Williams argued that the film invited audiences to share multiple points of view, and that Stella's actions could be seen as showing strength and agency. Responses published in Cinema Journal between 1984 and 1985 opened for debate and critique some of the assumptions in feminist film theory of the time and introduced research on images of the mother in cinema.

LAURA MULVEY
b. Oxford, England, 15 August 1941

Laura Mulvey could not have anticipated the widespread impact of her short polemical essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published in 1975 in the British journal Screen. The essay's psychoanalytic formulation of a "male gaze," and its condemnation of classical Hollywood cinema's patriarchal bias, immediately provoked interest, debate, and in some quarters dismay. Those who appreciated Mulvey's theories went on, as did Mulvey herself in her extensive writings, to deepen, adjust, and further her insights; those who responded negatively to the essay were challenged to articulate why, and in so doing to develop other theories. Much of the criticism of the essay called into question its strong psychoanalytic stance, shortchanging its political argument. Since the essay's publication, debates within film theory about the utility of psychoanalytic theories have continued.

In a subsequent essay published in 1981, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, "Mulvey addressed persistent questions about her lack of attention to the material female spectator in her "Visual Pleasure" essay. She noted that she was less interested in the female spectator who resists the "masculinization" that Hollywood cinema demands than the one who secretly enjoys the freedom of action and agency that identifying with the male protagonist offers. Using Freudian theories about female sexuality as well as Vladimir Propp's analysis of narrative structure in folk tales, Mulvey examined the difficulty of sexual difference in the western Duel in the Sun (1946).

Mulvey is also a filmmaker and has made several with Peter Wollen, including Penthesilea (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), and Amy! (1979). These films reflect Mulvey's theoretical views of Hollywood cinema, exploring the difficulty of representing the feminine in a patriarchal world. In each film the struggles of women in patriarchy are transformed by placing them within the discourses of psychoanalysis and history. Some of the films make reference to Hollywood cinema—Amy!, for example, refers specifically to Dorothy Arzner's Christopher Strong—in order to examine the ideological bases of that film.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Penthesilea (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Amy! (1979)

FURTHER READING

Fischer, Lucy. Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 2000.

——. Women in Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London and New York: Routledge, 1983, 2000.

Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

——. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

E. Ann Kaplan

Objections to cine-psychoanalysis included: 1) objection to psychoanalytic film criticism's obvious heterosexism; 2) its apparent exclusion of the body; 3) its equally apparent pessimism about social change because of investment in linguistic theories; 4) its incipient "whiteness"; and 5) its a- or even antihistorical bias. Scholars critiquing psychoanalytic theories refused the inherently Cartesian mind–body split; denied that language was totally determining; attended to cinematic practices and representations of minority, Third World, and gay women; and, finally, corrected the lack of basic historical information by seeking to find out what women had actually accomplished in Hollywood from its earliest days. If earlier gay and lesbian critiques anticipated the explosion in gay and lesbian approaches to film, as well as the related "queering" of gender images and psychoanalysis, later work was inspired by Judith Butler's theory of gender as performative rather than biological. Black and Latino studies were instituted as more minority students attended college, and debates about US and international racism raged. Inspired work in feminist film and cultural studies began to develop, led by African American critics and filmmakers, such as bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Jacqueline Bobo, and Julie Dash. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, for example, hooks justly criticized feminist theorists for their lack of attention to the specificity of race in film. Building on white feminists' gaze theories, hooks coined the term "the oppositional gaze" as she shifted the point of view in a series of readings to the gaze of the hitherto oppressed black subject, whose look at white culture was for so long forbidden. Carol Clover moved gaze theories forward, and feminism backward perhaps, in her groundbreaking 1992 study of the horror film, the genre in which emerges, she argues, a gender crossing that is liberating for males. Heroines in slasher films, she says, are "transformed males," and what looks like male-on-female violence stands in for male-on-male sex. Clover goes on to show, however, that this gender game, once observed, applies in other kinds of film in which, perhaps in response to feminist agendas and analyses, males appropriate the female form for their own ends and desires, a process that challenges gender-specific theories of identification.

The directions in which the field grew and changed, through its destabilization by questions raised by minority, gay, and Third World women, eroded older, seemingly secure binaries of feminist film theory. Psychoanalytic theories of the gaze no longer were central to feminist analysis. However, these ideas then informed "masculinity" studies of Steve Neale, Krin Gabbard, and Peter Lehman, which followed feminist film theory and which were part of the shift from feminist film theory to gender studies in film. Within feminist scholarship, approaches broadened to combine historical, sociological, psychological, and genre aspects in research by Miriam Hansen, Lucy Fischer, Annette Kuhn, and Janice Welsch, among others. Hansen's study of gender in early American cinema brought feminist theory to silent cinema studies, while Kuhn's cultural studies approach includes an ethnographic study of cinema viewing practices through interviews with elderly London residents.

A solid body of feminist research, including feminist film theory, has provided the foundation for much cultural work by third-wave feminists, whose interest in cross-identification, transvestism, and transgender images is taking feminist work in new directions. Psychoanalysis may not be the central focus of many studies, but, like gaze theory, it is now being revised to fit new family paradigms, digital media, and phenomena of late global capitalism. Although the pioneers of feminist film theory have moved on to new topics, feminist theory continues to be relevant to film scholarship. A great deal has been written about feminist film theory and its vicissitudes, including many edited anthologies. Significantly, in 2004 the prestigious journal Signs devoted an entire issue to reevaluating feminist film theory. Almost from its origins, feminist film theory has been defined by lively debates; but important also are the strong links between the feminist movement and feminist scholarship, which have persisted as feminisms have arisen and waned and then reemerged in different environments.

SEE ALSO Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Cinema;Gender;Marxism;Melodrama;Psychoanalysis;Queer Theory;Woman's Pictures

FURTHER READING

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

De Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." Screen 24 (September-October 1982): 74–87.

——. "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body." In Feminism and Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 86–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film. London: British Film Institute, 1987.

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London and New York: Routledge, 1983, 2000.

Kuhn, Annette. Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

Mellen, Joan. Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film. New York: Horizon Press, 1974.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Rodowick, David. "The Difficulty of Difference." Wide Angle 5, no. 1 (1982): 4–15.

Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream. New York: Avon Books, 1973.

Studlar, Gaylyn. In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

E. Ann Kaplan